Businessman’s Lunch a Daily Miracle in India

Every working day the 2,300 or so dabbawallahs of Bombay perform a minor miracle.

From businessmen’s loving wives and mothers in the suburbs these men collect 100,000 hot, home-cooked meals in special lunch pails called dabbas, or tiffin boxes. Then, blending military discipline with an intricate system of relays and symbols, they deliver these meals to husbands and sons working in the city.

No other city in the world is believed to have anything like this service. And in bustling Bombay, a businessman’s city without a businessman’s lunch, grateful patrons have created loving legends about the dependability of the dabbawallah.

Caught in Monsoon

The most famous of these involves a dabbawallah who, at the height of the monsoon season, was on a train headed for the city with his lunches. As often happens, the train stalled in the monsoon flooding and the dabbawallah, fearful that he might be late with his deliveries, left the train. He took with him, balanced on his head in what is known as a tiffin rack, his consignment of tiffin boxes. In the street he was run down by a bus and killed.

Another dabbawallah, who witnessed the accident, identified his fallen colleague’s route by the secret symbols painted on the tiffin boxes. He snatched them up and delivered them--hot and on time, as usual.

Thus the Bombay dabbawallah, like the mailman who is stayed by neither snow nor rain nor heat, is regarded as a paragon of responsibility who rarely fails to complete his appointed rounds.

The dabbas are collected every day at 10 a.m. from homes in most of the Bombay suburbs. The cylindrical containers, about the size of the familiar American oatmeal package, are marked with a painted symbol, a kind of hieroglyphic, that identifies the home where it is collected and the office to which it is to be delivered.

The tiffin racks, many of which can accommodate up to 39 dabbas in three rows of 13, are carried to the suburban railway station on bicycles equipped to carry 40 or more racks. Outside the railway station, the dabbas are sorted according to their next destination, usually either Victoria or Churchgate station in the city’s main business district, where more than 300,000 commuters work.

At the suburban station, each dabbawallah is handed a rack loaded with dabbas, and he rides with his cargo in the train’s baggage compartment. For this privilege, he pays 60 rupees a month, about $5.

At the station in the city, there is a frenzy of activity as tiffin boxes are sorted out. Then, when their loads are finally arranged, the dabbawallahs race off into the forest of skyscrapers to make their deliveries.

The work is hard. Each dabbawallah must be able to carry a 150-pound tiffin rack balanced on his head, and much of his work is done almost at a run. Often he is required to climb many flights of stairs, for the managers of some buildings forbid dabbawallahs to use the elevator.

After lunch, the system is turned inside out. The same dabbawallahs who delivered the tiffin boxes retrieve them and return them to the station where they are re-sorted to begin their journeys back to the suburbs.

Most dabbawallahs live outside the city because that is where they start the day’s work. Also, they cannot afford to live in the city, which has some of the most expensive real estate in Asia.

Service Pays for Itself

For this delivery service the customer pays 25 rupees a month, or $2. That brings the cost of a typical hot lunch of rice, a vegetable, lentils and bread to about two rupees, compared to the eight or nine rupees charged by an inexpensive restaurant, so the service soon pays for itself.

A dabbawallah’s earnings average 900 rupees a month, about $75. He may not be handsomely paid, but he enjoys a reputation for dependability and integrity that is without parallel, and he takes pride in this.

Hari Chand, 33, began his dabbawallah career 18 years ago. He remembers only one occasion when he failed to make a delivery.

“Mistakes are very rare,” he said, with no trace of a smile, indicating that he is still troubled by the memory of his single non-delivery.

Chand said he became a dabbawallah because he was uneducated and needed work.

“You have to know someone to get a job in an office,” he said. “Even if you bribed them, they would not let you in.”

Exclusive Occupation

What Chand did not say is that the same exclusivity is enjoyed by his occupation. Almost all the dabbawallahs are Hindus from the Pune area in the state of Maharashtra. There are no Muslims or other outsiders in the dabbawallah ranks. Dabbawallahs are not equal-opportunity employers.

Like his colleagues, Chand is proud of the physical strength he has developed. When two companions placed the heavy rack on his head, which is protected only by a small ring of cloth and his cotton cap, the muscles rippled in his legs.

There are reports of a decline in the number of people using the dabbawallah service, but they are vigorously denied by leaders of Bombay’s tiffin-suppliers union.

The dabbawallah system was established in Bombay at the turn of the century, partly because the city had grown so big that office workers could no longer get home easily for lunch.

Cultural Melting Pot

Other factors were religion and caste. More than any other Indian city, Bombay is a melting pot of faiths and cultures, and this causes problems at the dining table. According to Hindu caste rules, food must be prepared by members of one’s own caste or of a higher caste. A Hindu may not share his food with a Muslim, a Parsee, a Christian, a Jain, a Buddhist, a Jew or a member of any of the other faiths that make up Bombay’s population of 8 million.

Thus, members of the Hindu Brahmin high caste are expected to eat only food prepared by other Brahmins.

In recent years, however, in urban centers like Bombay, some of the caste rules have broken down. American-style fast-food franchises, including pizza parlors, have come into fashion.

Earlier this year, a lobbying group that calls itself Bombay’s Right to Green Parks began campaigning for a downtown park that would contain dozens of fast-food restaurants for those who do not carry their lunch with them or have it sent by dabbawallah.

Most Are Illiterate

Not long ago a reporter joined Hari Chand and a group of his fellow dabbawallahs on a train into the city. In the baggage compartment they touched up the symbols on the lids of the tiffin boxes, using artists’ brushes to inscribe dots and clusters of dots, religious signs and letters in Hindi and English. Somehow, even though most of the dabbawallahs are illiterate, the symbols all make sense.

The reporter tried to follow Chand on his rounds, and ended up exhausted and drenched in perspiration. In about 20 minutes, Chand had delivered 25 lunches weighing in all more than 100 pounds. There were vegetarian dishes for Hindus and Jains, meats for Muslims and Christians, a dish called vindaloo for Goans, Brahmin puris, Tamil curd rices and Bengali sweets.

In the course of his rounds, Chand climbed more than 20 flights of stairs. He ended up at the ground-floor office of an accountant named Kuresh Ram Puruwala, who did not seem to be particularly appreciative of the effort required to bring him a hot meal of mutton curry, rice, flat chapati bread and mango pickles.

“This thing (the dabbawallah service),” he said, “is so we do not have the burden of carrying this tiffin box with us in the morning when we come to work and in the evening when we go home.”